Word: costas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When Congress appeared ready to resume military funding in October 1986, North proposed that the CIA purchase the Project Democracy assets, which he listed as including six aircraft, warehouses, ships, boats, houses and a 6,520-ft. airstrip in northern Costa Rica. The price tag: $4.5 million. North even seems to have engaged in near blackmail when officials in Costa Rica threatened to close this airstrip. After consulting with Elliott Abrams, the top State Department official on contra policy, and Lewis Tambs, U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica, North reported that he called Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez to threaten...
North was an obsessive master of detail, organizing everything from building a 6,520-ft. runway in Costa Rica to controlling the movements of a Danish- registered ship for the purpose of carrying weapons to the contras, and writing up talking points for negotiations with shady arms merchants. Whenever the Administration's enthusiasm seemed to be flagging on either the Iran or contra front, North whirled into action, proposing new policies for extricating the hostages and novel ways to raise more millions for the Nicaraguan rebels, sometimes employing the most outrageous of lies and schemes to keep the action going...
...meetings with the President at Camp David. He wheedled support for the contras out of some half a dozen foreign governments and an assortment of private citizens. Despite the CIA's objections, he gave intelligence information to the Iranians. He claimed that he had threatened the President of Costa Rica with the cutoff of U.S. aid if the President disclosed the existence of a covert airstrip. At one point, he even proposed sinking or hijacking a freighter en route to Nicaragua and stealing the weapons on board for the contras...
...Soviet brigade in Cuba intolerable. Reagan declared the crackdown on Polish Solidarity intolerable. And the intolerable endured, despite the brave words. To be serious about containing Sandinista subversion -- overt and covert -- will mean vigilance, resources and risk. It will mean everything from pouring aid into El Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica to establishing a ring of American bases around the border of Nicaragua; even, as Walter Mondale suggested during the 1984 campaign, to setting up a naval blockade to contain the Sandinistas. But why is it preferable so hugely to commit American resources? To station permanently American troops to serve...
...peasant army that wants to overthrow its own government. That army believes that its country has been taken over by Leninists who have shut down the opposition, destroyed a free press, repressed the church and run a secret police "advised" by Cubans and East Germans. As the President of Costa Rica put it, the "Nicaraguan people . . . have fought so hard to get rid of one tyrant, one dictator, and seven years later they have nine...